After a moment Shan rose. "I'll send some paper out. You know we will read the letter before we deliver it. Say anything you wish. Just nothing about Jokar, and nothing about this place." He had taken five steps when he paused and looked back at Lin, who still stared into the air. "That girl, Anya," he said to Lin's back, "she has no family either."

Lin's head pulled up but he did not acknowledge that he heard.

Unexpectedly, there was laughter at the entrance to the hidden rooms when Shan approached it. Winslow was there, with Anya and Nyma, showing them tricks with one of the braided leather ropes the purbas carried. Having made a loop in one end, Winslow was waving the rope over his head and releasing it to catch things. A narrow rock set on its end twenty feet away. A small boulder on the slope above. Anya, standing still, arms at her side, giggled as the rope dropped over her head and closed about her waist. Shan smiled then stepped inside for Lin's paper, which Lhandro offered to take to the colonel when the rongpa learned what it was for. The young purba challenged Shan's judgment at first, but Somo raised her hand to silence him.

"What it means," she declared with a dangerous gleam, "is that Lin will demand the howlers give up Tenzin and Lokesh."

When Shan wandered back outside, another figure had joined Winslow. Jokar, a playful expression in his eyes, stood perfectly erect as the American lassoed him once, twice, then again. Each time the lama nodded his head approvingly, then finally he asked if he could learn the use of the rope. Shan, Anya, and Nyma watched in amusement as the lama fumbled with the rope, slowly twirled it over his head. He missed his target the first three times, then missed no more, finally asking Winslow himself to stand, laughing as he brought the rope down over the American's shoulders.

"It is like archery," Jokar smiled with an approving nod, "without the bow." Then the old lama asked Anya and Nyma to try to lasso him, which they tried lightheartedly for a quarter hour, until the lama suddenly pointed to a rock in the rubble with lichen in the outline, he insisted, of a horse's head, the sign of Tamdin, the horse-headed protector demon.

Shan and Winslow lingered at the rock wall long after the others were called away by Lepka's announcement that fresh tea had been churned.

"I'm going with you," the American declared suddenly. "To Norbu."

Shan sighed. "It was your passport that protected you. After you gave it up, you have no-"

The American woman stepped out of the door. "For what?" Larkin asked Winslow. "Why would you give someone your State Department passport?"

Winslow grinned at her. "Lost it, that's all. I always lost my homework in school."

Larkin stared at him uncertainly. Her face flashed with color and she bit her lower lip. "We're going to find our friends who were arrested," Winslow said quietly.

"At Norbu," Larkin said. "I heard the purbas say they're at Second House."

"You know the gompa?" Shan asked.

"Some of the purbas speak of it. They say it's where the howlers take sick monks to be healed."

The words sent a chill down Shan's back.

"Some of us were in the mountains last month and saw a monk from Norbu. A monk, and a doctor in a blue uniform. With men who looked like soldiers, in white shirts, carrying small tanks of kerosene on their backs. I joked with them and told them they'd save a lot of trouble if they just used yak dung. But they didn't want to joke."

Shan stared at her and was about to ask what they could possibly have been doing with so much kerosene when someone else emerged from the shadows of the doorway. "We can't just march into that gompa," Somo said in a pained voice, as if she had been arguing with them about going to Norbu.

Shan was about to protest. He wanted no one else to go with him, no one else to expose themselves to the near certainty of arrest by the knobs. But Somo had come from Lhasa to help the fugitive lama, had lost Drakte in the struggle to keep Tenzin safe.

"You'll need people who were there before," Nyma said over Somo's shoulder. She was carrying two bowls of tea, which she extended to Shan and Winslow.

He sighed. Nyma, too, could not be refused. "We must make Director Tuan worried," Shan said. "Make him react somehow," he added and, as Lepka appeared, sipping from his bowl, he explained the letter he expected Lin to write.

"A start," Winslow agreed, "but what else is there at this gompa?"

Nyma spoke of the Public Security medical teams they had seen there, and Lhandro spoke of the nervous monks and the frightening, ruthless manner of the chairman.

"What is it that this Chairman Khodrak wants most of all?" Somo asked.

"He's ambitious," Nyma ventured. "He wants to win the Serenity Campaign. He wants to join the Bureau, people say, he wants to get attention so he will be promoted into the Bureau of Religious Affairs itself."

Promoted. Nyma was right, Shan knew, though he'd never before known of a monk who thought in such terms.

"What he wants right now," Lhandro said in a speculative tone, "is a May Day festival. But no one will go. It's a Chinese holiday."

The information seemed useless. They looked at each other, and looked at the sky. Winslow absently traced the pattern of the lichen with his fingertip.

"Your friend Lokesh," a rasping voice interjected from the shadows, "he told me you teach him the Tao te Ching sometimes."

Shan looked up at Lepka in surprise. The old farmer was speaking of the ancient text of the Tao, the teaching Shan had memorized as a boy. When he nodded, Lepka extended a finger in the sandy soil and began drawing. He made four simple lines, a line of two parts over a solid line, over two lines of three equal parts. A tetragram, it was called, used for designating chapters of the ancient book. The lines signified Chapter Thirty-six, called Concealing the Advantage. As the words ran through Shan's head he realized he was whispering them to his companions:

In order to weaken it,

It must be thoroughly strengthened,

In order to reject it,

It must be thoroughly promoted,

In order to take away from it,

It must be thoroughly endowed.

This is named subtle wisdom,

This is how the weak triumphs over the strong.

"A man like Tuan," Shan said with a nod to Lepka, "must be empowered to be destroyed."

Winslow looked up with a devious glint. "Beware of Greeks," he said, "beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

Larkin shared his conspiratorial grin. "A Trojan horse," she said, then turned to the others in the small circle. "It's a legend," she said, and explained.

They sat in silence, letting the words of the Tao te Ching and the Greek legend sink in.

"Perhaps," Shan ventured, "those who run Norbu must be careful what they ask for."

"And what the rongpa and dropka in the surrounding valleys want most of all," Lhandro suggested, "is a spring festival as in the old days."

They spoke for nearly an hour as the kettle boiled and Nyma churned tea. Somo brought out the other purbas, who listened and nodded excitedly. Somo disappeared through the door, emerging a moment later, strapping on her belt pack. She began running up the trail that led back up the mountain.

"Second House had a beautiful gonkang," a wisp of a voice said from behind them as Somo disappeared.

Nyma gasped. Jokar had materialized among the rocks ten feet away. "And the stable. We used to store herbs in that old stable."